What You Should Know About Cryotherapy

Cryotherapy, Cryo, being a Greek word for cold, generally associated with ice, is a sort of medical therapy that involves the use of ice cold water, or ice cubes themselves, basically, treatment involving the general use of very cold temperatures. You can read more about it at https://www.advancedcryonyc.com/health-and-wellness-cryo-facial.
Cryotherapy generally uses treat methods involving extremely cold temperatures to heal diseased tissues and is usually used to treat skin conditions. There are other applications as well that include treatment of muscle pain, swelling, and sprains

The treatment themselves range from a small scale, specific body targeted treatments to full body treatments involving ice baths and cold chambers. Even though the technology and the method of treatment sound simple enough to make sense, there hasn’t been solid results for long-term side effects and effective evidence to its desired outcome.
Cryosurgery is used to treat skin conditions like keratoses, moles, warts and other such diseases. Liquid nitrogen, which is generally at an extremely low temperature, is used to freeze the skin tissues at a cellular level. It’s usually considered a low-risk procedure and can be done easily and quickly.

Another type of treatment that’s used for body injuries is ice pack therapy. Ice pack therapy is used all the time and has been proven to alleviates most of the symptoms caused by the injuries, however, further testing has resulted in contradictory results regarding its efficiency.

How it works is, an ice pack is placed and pressed gently on the area of injury, which acts as a conduction of thermal energy that helps in absorption of heat. Exposing the injured areas to extremely cold temperatures decreases the amount of oxygen required by your body, decreases metabolic and enzymatic activities and also decreases muscle spindle fiber activity. It’s also used in relieving muscle soreness and decreases the pain caused by minor injuries. Most doctors usually advise against heavy physical activities soon after the treatment, however, it’s completely alright to do so provided that the duration of the treatment was less than ten minutes. This is because, since there is an imbalance in body temperatures, your performance will get negatively impacted. Letting your body heal completely will take some time.

An alternative to these methods is a treatment called whole body cryotherapy or WBC for short. This involves people exposing themselves to extremely cold temperatures in a dry place that’s usually below -100 degrees Celsius for up to four minutes.As mentioned before, liquid nitrogen is one of the ways to achieve temperatures like that and refrigerated cold air being the other. Even though this seems like the best treatment, further testing has shown that there isn’t a lot of difference between this and other methods.